Main module

Status: All features shown on this page should be working, but the API is still in active development, and may change at any time. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list for notice of updates.

Erroneous requests: When erroneous requests are sent to the API, an HTTP header will be sent with the key "MediaWiki-API-Error" and then both the value of the header and the error code sent back will be set to the same value. For more information see API: Errors and warnings.

Maximum lag can be used when MediaWiki is installed on a database replicated cluster. To save actions causing any more site replication lag, this parameter can make the client wait until the replication lag is less than the specified value. In case of excessive lag, error code maxlag is returned with a message like Waiting for $host: $lag seconds lagged.See Manual: Maxlag parameter for more information.

Type: integer

smaxage

Set the s-maxage HTTP cache control header to this many seconds. Errors are never cached.

Type: integer

Default: 0

maxage

Set the max-age HTTP cache control header to this many seconds. Errors are never cached.

Type: integer

Default: 0

assert

Verify the user is logged in if set to user, or has the bot user right if bot.

One of the following values: user, bot

requestid

Any value given here will be included in the response. May be used to distinguish requests.

When accessing the API using a cross-domain AJAX request (CORS), set this to the originating domain. This must be included in any pre-flight request, and therefore must be part of the request URI (not the POST body). This must match one of the origins in the Origin header exactly, so it has to be set to something like https://en.wikipedia.org or https://meta.wikimedia.org. If this parameter does not match the Origin header, a 403 response will be returned. If this parameter matches the Origin header and the origin is whitelisted, an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header will be set.

uselang

Language to use for message translations. action=query&meta=siteinfo with siprop=languages returns a list of language codes, or specify user to use the current user's language preference, or specify content to use this wiki's content language.